OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Tracking System For Baseball Game Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The baseball game is often seen as many contests that are performed between individuals. The duel between the pitcher and the batter, for example, is considered the engine that drives the sport. The pitchers use a variety of strategies to gain competitive advantage against the batter, who does his best to figure out the ball trajectory and react in time for a hit. In this work, we propose a system that captures the movements of the pitcher, the batter, and the ball in a high level of detail, and discuss several ways how this information may be processed to compute interesting statistics. We demonstrate on a large database of videos that our methods achieve comparable results as previous systems, while operating solely on video material. In addition, state-of-the-art AI techniques are incorporated to augment the amount of information that is made available for players, coaches, teams, and fans.
Improving Training on Noisy Stuctured Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Fine-grained annotations---e.g. dense image labels, image segmentation and text tagging---are useful in many ML applications but they are labor-intensive to generate. Moreover there are often systematic, structured errors in these fine-grained annotations. For example, a car might be entirely unannotated in the image, or the boundary between a car and street might only be coarsely annotated. Standard ML training on data with such structured errors produces models with biases and poor performance. In this work, we propose a novel framework of Error-Correcting Networks (ECN) to address the challenge of learning in the presence structured error in fine-grained annotations. Given a large noisy dataset with commonly occurring structured errors, and a much smaller dataset with more accurate annotations, ECN is able to substantially improve the prediction of fine-grained annotations compared to standard approaches for training on noisy data. It does so by learning to leverage the structures in the annotations and in the noisy labels. Systematic experiments on image segmentation and text tagging demonstrate the strong performance of ECN in improving training on noisy structured labels.
An Empirical Evaluation on Robustness and Uncertainty of Regularization Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Despite apparent human-level performances of deep neural networks (DNN), they behave fundamentally differently from humans. They easily change predictions when small corruptions such as blur and noise are applied on the input (lack of robustness), and they often produce confident predictions on out-of-distribution samples (improper uncertainty measure). While a number of researches have aimed to address those issues, proposed solutions are typically expensive and complicated (e.g. Bayesian inference and adversarial training). Meanwhile, many simple and cheap regularization methods have been developed to enhance the generalization of classifiers. Such regularization methods have largely been overlooked as baselines for addressing the robustness and uncertainty issues, as they are not specifically designed for that. In this paper, we provide extensive empirical evaluations on the robustness and uncertainty estimates of image classifiers (CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) trained with state-of-the-art regularization methods. Furthermore, experimental results show that certain regularization methods can serve as strong baseline methods for robustness and uncertainty estimation of DNNs.
Nearly Optimal Clustering Risk Bounds for Kernel K-Means
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we study the statistical properties of kernel $k$-means and obtain a nearly optimal excess clustering risk bound, substantially improving the state-of-art bounds in the existing clustering risk analyses. We further analyze the statistical effect of computational approximations of the Nyström kernel $k$-means, and prove that it achieves the same statistical accuracy as the exact kernel $k$-means considering only $Ω(\sqrt{nk})$ Nyström landmark points. To the best of our knowledge, such sharp excess clustering risk bounds for kernel (or approximate kernel) $k$-means have never been proposed before.
Integrating Acting, Planning and Learning in Hierarchical Operational Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

We present new planning and learning algorithms for RAE, the Refinement Acting Engine. RAE uses hierarchical operational models to perform tasks in dynamically changing environments. Our planning procedure, UPOM, does a UCT-like search in the space of operational models in order to find a near-optimal method to use for the task and context at hand. Our learning strategies acquire, from online acting experiences and/or simulated planning results, a mapping from decision contexts to method instances as well as a heuristic function to guide UPOM. Our experimental results show that UPOM and our learning strategies significantly improve RAE's performance in four test domains using two different metrics: efficiency and success ratio.
Causal Interpretability for Machine Learning -- Problems, Methods and Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning models have had discernible achievements in a myriad of applications. However, most of these models are black-boxes, and it is obscure how the decisions are made by them. This makes the models unreliable and untrustworthy. To provide insights into the decision making processes of these models, a variety of traditional interpretable models have been proposed. Moreover, to generate more human-friendly explanations, recent work on interpretability tries to answer questions related to causality such as "Why does this model makes such decisions?" or "Was it a specific feature that caused the decision made by the model?". In this work, models that aim to answer causal questions are referred to as causal interpretable models. The existing surveys have covered concepts and methodologies of traditional interpretability. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey on causal interpretable models from the aspects of the problems and methods. In addition, this survey provides in-depth insights into the existing evaluation metrics for measuring interpretability, which can help practitioners understand for what scenarios each evaluation metric is suitable.
MCMC Guided CNN Training and Segmentation for Pancreas Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Efficient organ segmentation is the precondition of various quantitative analysis. Segmenting the pancreas from abdominal CT images is a challenging task because of its high anatomical variability in shape, size and location. What's more, the pancreas only occupies a small portion in abdomen, and the organ border is very fuzzy. All these factors make the segmentation methods of other organs less suitable for the pancreas segmentation. In this report, we propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling guided convolutional neural network (CNN) approach, in order to handle such difficulties in morphological and photometric variabilities. Specifically, the proposed method mainly contains three steps: First, registration is carried out to mitigate the body weight and location variability. Then, an MCMC sampling is employed to guide the sampling of 3D patches, which are fed to the CNN for training. At the same time, the pancreas distribution is also learned for the subsequent segmentation. Third, sampled from the learned distribution, an MCMC process guides the segmentation process. Lastly, the patches based segmentation is fused using a Bayesian voting scheme. This method is evaluated on the NIH pancreatic datasets which contains 82 abdominal contrast-enhanced CT volumes. Finally, we achieved a competitive result of 78.13% Dice Similarity Coefficient value and 82.65% Recall value in testing data.
Probabilistic Egocentric Motion Correction of Lidar Point Cloud and Projection to Camera Images for Moving Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

The fusion of sensor data from heterogeneous sensors is crucial for robust perception in various robotics applications that involve moving platforms, for instance, autonomous vehicle navigation. In particular, combining camera and lidar sensors enables the projection of precise range information of the surrounding environment onto visual images. It also makes it possible to label each lidar point with visual segmentation/classification results for 3D mapping, which facilitates a higher level understanding of the scene. The task is however considered non-trivial due to intrinsic and extrinsic sensor calibration, and the distortion of lidar points resulting from the ego-motion of the platform. Despite the existence of many lidar ego-motion correction methods, the errors in the correction process due to uncertainty in ego-motion estimation are not possible to remove completely. It is thus essential to consider the problem a probabilistic process where the ego-motion estimation uncertainty is modelled and considered consistently. The paper investigates the probabilistic lidar ego-motion correction and lidar-to-camera projection, where both the uncertainty in the ego-motion estimation and time jitter in sensory measurements are incorporated. The proposed approach is validated both in simulation and using real-world data collected from an electric vehicle retrofitted with wide-angle cameras and a 16-beam scanning lidar.
Metric Learning for Ordered Labeled Trees with pq-grams
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Computing the similarity between two data points plays a vital role in many machine learning algorithms. Metric learning has the aim of learning a good metric automatically from data. Most existing studies on metric learning for tree-structured data have adopted the approach of learning the tree edit distance. However, the edit distance is not amenable for big data analysis because it incurs high computation cost. In this paper, we propose a new metric learning approach for tree-structured data with pq-grams. The pq-gram distance is a distance for ordered labeled trees, and has much lower computation cost than the tree edit distance. In order to perform metric learning based on pq-grams, we propose a new differentiable parameterized distance, weighted pq-gram distance. We also propose a way to learn the proposed distance based on Large Margin Nearest Neighbors (LMNN), which is a well-studied and practical metric learning scheme. We formulate the metric learning problem as an optimization problem and use the gradient descent technique to perform metric learning. We empirically show that the proposed approach not only achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art edit distance-based methods in various classification problems, but also solves the classification problems much more rapidly than the edit distance-based methods.
A Survey on The Expressive Power of Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are effective machine learning models for various graph learning problems. Despite their empirical successes, the theoretical limitations of GNNs have been revealed recently. Consequently, many GNN models have been proposed to overcome these limitations. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the expressive power of GNNs and provably powerful variants of GNNs.
Towards Modular Algorithm Induction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We present a modular neural network architecture Main that learns algorithms given a set of input-output examples. Main consists of a neural controller that interacts with a variable-length input tape and learns to compose modules together with their corresponding argument choices. Unlike previous approaches, Main uses a general domain-agnostic mechanism for selection of modules and their arguments. It uses a general input tape layout together with a parallel history tape to indicate most recently used locations. Finally, it uses a memoryless controller with a length-invariant self-attention based input tape encoding to allow for random access to tape locations. The Main architecture is trained end-to-end using reinforcement learning from a set of input-output examples. We evaluate Main on five algorithmic tasks and show that it can learn policies that generalizes perfectly to inputs of much longer lengths than the ones used for training.
Collaborative Learning of Semi-Supervised Clustering and Classification for Labeling Uncurated Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Domain-specific image collections present potential value in various areas of science and business but are often not curated nor have any way to readily extract relevant content. To employ contemporary supervised image analysis methods on such image data, they must first be cleaned and organized, and then manually labeled for the nomenclature employed in the specific domain, which is a time consuming and expensive endeavor. To address this issue, we designed and implemented the Plud system. Plud provides an iterative semi-supervised workflow to minimize the effort spent by an expert and handles realistic large collections of images. We believe it can support labeling datasets regardless of their size and type. Plud is an iterative sequence of unsupervised clustering, human assistance, and supervised classification. With each iteration 1) the labeled dataset grows, 2) the generality of the classification method and its accuracy increases, and 3) manual effort is reduced. We evaluated the effectiveness of our system, by applying it on over a million images documenting human decomposition. In our experiment comparing manual labeling with labeling conducted with the support of Plud, we found that it reduces the time needed to label data and produces highly accurate models for this new domain.
Anti-Aging Scheduling in Single-Server Queues: A Systematic and Comparative Study
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The Age-of-Information (AoI) is a new performance metric recently proposed for measuring the freshness of information in information-update systems. In this work, we conduct a systematic and comparative study to investigate the impact of scheduling policies on the AoI performance in single-server queues and provide useful guidelines for the design of AoI-efficient scheduling policies. Specifically, we first perform extensive simulations to demonstrate that the update-size information can be leveraged for achieving a substantially improved AoI compared to non-size-based (or arrival-time-based) policies. Then, by utilizing both the update-size and arrival-time information, we propose three AoI-based policies. Observing improved AoI performance of policies that allow service preemption and that prioritize informative updates, we further propose preemptive, informative, AoI-based scheduling policies. Our simulation results show that such policies empirically achieve the best AoI performance among all the considered policies. However, compared to the best delay-efficient policies (such as Shortest-Remaining-Processing-Time (SRPT)), the AoI improvement is rather marginal in the settings with exogenous arrivals. Interestingly, we also prove sample-path equivalence between some size-based policies and AoI-based policies. This provides an intuitive explanation for why some size-based policies (such as SRPT) achieve a very good AoI performance.
Propagating Asymptotic-Estimated Gradients for Low Bitwidth Quantized Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The quantized neural networks (QNNs) can be useful for neural network acceleration and compression, but during the training process they pose a challenge: how to propagate the gradient of loss function through the graph flow with a derivative of 0 almost everywhere. In response to this non-differentiable situation, we propose a novel Asymptotic-Quantized Estimator (AQE) to estimate the gradient. In particular, during back-propagation, the graph that relates inputs to output remains smoothness and differentiability. At the end of training, the weights and activations have been quantized to low-precision because of the asymptotic behaviour of AQE. Meanwhile, we propose a M-bit Inputs and N-bit Weights Network (MINW-Net) trained by AQE, a quantized neural network with 1-3 bits weights and activations. In the inference phase, we can use XNOR or SHIFT operations instead of convolution operations to accelerate the MINW-Net. Our experiments on CIFAR datasets demonstrate that our AQE is well defined, and the QNNs with AQE perform better than that with Straight-Through Estimator (STE). For example, in the case of the same ConvNet that has 1-bit weights and activations, our MINW-Net with AQE can achieve a prediction accuracy 1.5\% higher than the Binarized Neural Network (BNN) with STE. The MINW-Net, which is trained from scratch by AQE, can achieve comparable classification accuracy as 32-bit counterparts on CIFAR test sets. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet dataset show great superiority of the proposed AQE and our MINW-Net achieves comparable results with other state-of-the-art QNNs.
Single-view 2D CNNs with Fully Automatic Non-nodule Categorization for False Positive Reduction in Pulmonary Nodule Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Background and Objective: In pulmonary nodule detection, the first stage, candidate detection, aims to detect suspicious pulmonary nodules. However, detected candidates include many false positives and thus in the following stage, false positive reduction, such false positives are reliably reduced. Note that this task is challenging due to 1) the imbalance between the numbers of nodules and non-nodules and 2) the intra-class diversity of non-nodules. Although techniques using 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promising performance, they suffer from high computational complexity which hinders constructing deep networks. To efficiently address these problems, we propose a novel framework using the ensemble of 2D CNNs using single views, which outperforms existing 3D CNN-based methods. Methods: Our ensemble of 2D CNNs utilizes single-view 2D patches to improve both computational and memory efficiency compared to previous techniques exploiting 3D CNNs. We first categorize non-nodules on the basis of features encoded by an autoencoder. Then, all 2D CNNs are trained by using the same nodule samples, but with different types of non-nodules. By extending the learning capability, this training scheme resolves difficulties of extracting representative features from non-nodules with large appearance variations. Note that, instead of manual categorization requiring the heavy workload of radiologists, we propose to automatically categorize non-nodules based on the autoencoder and k-means clustering.
Learning a generative model for robot control using visual feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a novel formulation for incorporating visual feedback in controlling robots. We define a generative model from actions to image observations of features on the end-effector. Inference in the model allows us to infer the robot state corresponding to target locations of the features. This, in turn, guides motion of the robot and allows for matching the target locations of the features in significantly fewer steps than state-of-the-art visual servoing methods. The training procedure for our model enables effective learning of the kinematics, feature structure, and camera parameters, simultaneously. This can be done with no prior information about the robot, structure, and cameras that observe it. Learning is done sample-efficiently and shows strong generalization to test data. Since our formulation is modular, we can modify components of our setup, like cameras and objects, and relearn them quickly online. Our method can handle noise in the observed state and noise in the controllers that we interact with. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by executing grasping and tight-fit insertions on robots with inaccurate controllers.
Closure Properties for Private Classification and Online Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Let~$\cH$ be a class of boolean functions and consider a {\it composed class} $\cH'$ that is derived from~$\cH$ using some arbitrary aggregation rule (for example, $\cH'$ may be the class of all 3-wise majority-votes of functions in $\cH$). We upper bound the Littlestone dimension of~$\cH'$ in terms of that of~$\cH$. As a corollary, we derive closure properties for online learning and private PAC learning. The derived bounds on the Littlestone dimension exhibit an undesirable exponential dependence. For private learning, we prove close to optimal bounds that circumvents this suboptimal dependency. The improved bounds on the sample complexity of private learning are derived algorithmically via transforming a private learner for the original class $\cH$ to a private learner for the composed class~$\cH'$. Using the same ideas we show that any ({\em proper or improper}) private algorithm that learns a class of functions $\cH$ in the realizable case (i.e., when the examples are labeled by some function in the class) can be transformed to a private algorithm that learns the class $\cH$ in the agnostic case.
Diversity inducing Information Bottleneck in Model Ensembles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Although deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a number of vision tasks, generalization over high dimensional multi-modal data, and reliable predictive uncertainty estimation are still active areas of research. Bayesian approaches including Bayesian Neural Nets (BNNs) do not scale well to modern computer vision tasks, as they are difficult to train, and have poor generalization under dataset-shift. This motivates the need for effective ensembles which can generalize and give reliable uncertainty estimates. In this paper, we target the problem of generating effective ensembles of neural networks by encouraging diversity in prediction. We explicitly optimize a diversity inducing adversarial loss for learning the stochastic latent variables and thereby obtain diversity in the output predictions necessary for modeling multi-modal data. We evaluate our method on benchmark datasets: MNIST, CIFAR100, TinyImageNet and MIT Places 2, and compared to the most competitive baselines show significant improvements in classification accuracy, under a shift in the data distribution and in out-of-distribution detection. Code will be released in this url https://github.com/rvl-lab-utoronto/dibs
3D Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose an alternating directional 3D quasi-recurrent neural network for hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising, which can effectively embed the domain knowledge -- structural spatio-spectral correlation and global correlation along spectrum. Specifically, 3D convolution is utilized to extract structural spatio-spectral correlation in an HSI, while a quasi-recurrent pooling function is employed to capture the global correlation along spectrum. Moreover, alternating directional structure is introduced to eliminate the causal dependency with no additional computation cost. The proposed model is capable of modeling spatio-spectral dependency while preserving the flexibility towards HSIs with arbitrary number of bands. Extensive experiments on HSI denoising demonstrate significant improvement over state-of-the-arts under various noise settings, in terms of both restoration accuracy and computation time. Our code is available at https://github.com/Vandermode/QRNN3D.